Thawing of meat is frequently a process stage which must be carried out before further process stages, such as preservation, addition of salts, drying, heat preparation, packing, etc., take place. Thawing is carried out e.g. by removing the meat from a freezer room and storing the meat in a room at a temperature above the freezing point of the meat at the prevailing atmospheric pressure for a period of time which is required in order for the meat to thaw and be ready for the next process stage.
In certain industrial processes, large amounts of meat are present in smaller units of meat, which are e.g. cut, cleaned or the like pieces of meat. Freeze storage of large amounts of meat causes the smaller pieces to freeze together to individual larger blocks of meat, unless special measures are taken, such as individual packing of the units of meat before freezing. Since this measure is a time- and resource-consuming intermediate stage, it is frequently left out, and the situation prior to the thawing of the meat is therefore that large amounts of meat have most frequently frozen together. It may be a time-consuming process to thaw the meat by simple storage of the meat at a temperature higher than the freezing point of the meat, since large blocks of meat consisting of numerous units of meat require a considerably longer period of thawing than each individual unit of meat. Typically, the block of meat will thaw inhomogenously, so that the units of meat near the surface have thawed after a while, while pieces of meat not close to the surface are still frozen.